What You Want, Adam Silver, A Cookie?

So NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned Donald Sterling for life and fined him $2.5 million, and probably is going to get the rest of the owners to agree to force Sterling into selling a team he bought 30 years ago for $12 million at what likely will be an eleventy-thousand percent markup. And everybody seems happy. It is at moments like this when we are well advised to take seriously the caution of Mr. Winston Wolf.

First of all, Donald Sterling has been an open pustulation on the National Basketball Association since back in the days when nobody cared about the league at all. This was a camel with a full load of straw on its back long before his girlfriend pulled a Gordon Liddy on him last week. The fact that, now, the NBA has decided that it has stood all it can stand and it can't stands no more prompts me, again, to associate myself with the remarks of Mr. Rock of Brooklyn. This is a problem the NBA should have cleaned up decades ago. If you believe that is unfair to Mr. Silver, I suggest you take your argument up with Bernard Cardinal Law, now presiding at the Basilica of Our Lady of the Clean Getaway in Rome.

Secondly, let's see how it all shakes out regarding the NBA's attempt to force Sterling to sell his team. (The NBA players association is demanding a timetable, which is the way you pursue an advantage.) A sensible person would take his eleventy-thousand percent markup and run like a thief. Sterling, however, is demonstrably not sensible. I think he might arrange to live to be 180 if he thought he could beat the league in court. We will have to see.

(By the way, it was quite funny to see Mayor Kevin Johnson up there touting the strength of the players union. That should make for some interesting dinner conversations back home with the missus, union-busting school "reform" grifter, Michelle Rhee, although a union full of millionnaires might be the only kind of union she would support.)

Last, OK, what have we all learned? Plutocrats think badly of everyone who is not one of them. (Check out Dave D'Allessandro's survey of Sterling's fellow owners. These are not social democrats here.) They consider those people to be lesser members of the species. Sometimes, this is expressed in racist terms. This is the way of the world in 2014. You're just not supposed to put it in the street this way. When Silver moves on the DeVos family for financing anti-gay bigotry on a nationwide basis, y'all can get back to me.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.